It is generally known that vehicle wiring harnesses are very complex and cumbersome to modify. Moreover, many modern vehicles provide the driver with the ability to modify the vehicle's electrical functionality, and the added complexity created by this feature has to be incorporated into the design of the vehicle's wiring harness. Further complicating the process of generating and/or modifying vehicle wiring harnesses is the fact that no two vehicles have the same wiring harness configurations.
During harness design and modification, development statuses of wiring harnesses must be manually compared since there is no reproducible nomenclature that can be used to particularly identify the changes made for adaptation of the manufacturing plans. It can take over twelve hours to manually compare two change versions of a wiring harness in order to identify any changes that have been made.
While an open standard referred to as “KBL” has been developed to define automotive electrical wiring harnesses and is being used by a number of manufacturers and their suppliers, the standard IDs assigned by current wiring harness design software tools have a model-specific prefix followed by a sequential number. The result is that, from the vehicle's point of view, the same nodes, bundles, fasteners, wiring protection parts potentially have different IDs on different drawings. Similarly, from the vehicle's point of view, different nodes, bundles, fasteners, wiring protection parts potentially have the same IDs on different drawings. As a result, any electronic analyses, evaluations or comparisons, as well as the uniqueness of definitions (e.g., the routing definition for ring routing), is very complex and laborious.
Wiring harness manufacturers employ a so-called modeling board (FormBrett), where upon the wiring harness is actually produced. This board can be in the form of a 10 to 15 meter long wooden plate containing the paths and the holding fixtures to produce a wiring harness configuration, i.e., a particular wiring harness that will be integrated into a particular vehicle.
When a vehicle manufacturer requires a modification to an existing wiring harness, the wiring harness manufacturer would not typically want to discard its entire modeling board, but would rather prefer to adapt it. However, to accomplish this, the wiring harness manufacturer must know, on a diagram level, exactly what the requested modification consists of. Today, this cannot be calculated electronically given that the vehicle manufacturer's development tools and the wiring harness manufacturer's form board design tools are not readily compatible. Therefore, there is a need to provide a unique reproducible nomenclature for all components of a wiring harness such that automatic calculation and re-calculation of wiring harness configurations is made possible.